Caltrops - Gamerasutra - Final Impression: Negative!

Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

by Mischief Makers 11/06/2005, 2:30pm PST

I so desperately wanted to like this game. I love weird games. I learned to touch-type from "The Typing of the Dead" fer chrissake.

If there is ever a reason for this game to be noticed by future designers, it is as the perfect example of how Romero was truly wrong. A fantastically interesting plot, setting, and visual style can still be sunk by crappy gameplay. True, the monster-shooting in Silent Hill was also technically simple, but it sure as hell wasn't irritating and boring.

I can't believe this game was 4 years in development. What were thay doing during that time? Noncombat gameplay is the slightest notch above Dragon's Lair in that you press "X" to move down a predetermined path until its time to choose which door to walk through next. When it comes time for some combat, you switch to a first person view and play "House of the Dead," only you don't have a light gun, the zombies are a simple mass of polygons, and if you don't shoot them in their tiny, randomly placed "weak spot" you won't get any experience or special ammo. Plus, this is yet another game that thinks there's nothing better to do in an action game than POWERLEVEL by starting out your whole team of world-renowed psychotic assassins with really shitty wobbly aim.

What's strange is the puzzles in the game are drool bib obvious (in one room is a picture of some horses with numbers on them, in the next room are some toy horses you need to assign numbers to OH HOW WILL I EVER PUZZLE MY WAY THROUGH THIS BRAIN TWISTER???) and the game gives you way too many hints from the ghosts for these simple puzzles (on difficult mode.) Yet when something really bizarre comes along, you're left on your own.

There's one boss fight where you take on two old men with splattered faces who throw brains at you. The only hint you get from the game is "shoot the brains" which I did to no effect. A visit to Gamefaqs revealed to me that I had to shoot one of them in the tie, messing up his tie so the other one would turn and straighten it, revealing his (true?) brain in the process, despite the game giving no mention of their ties or anything vaguely related, then I must shoot all the flying brains except for one above the remaining old man to expose his true brain.

At that point I decided "fuck it." This is a game full of great "moments" but the hours of drudgery punctuated by aggravation you need to trudge through to get to those moments are more of an entry fee than I'm willing to pay. For way less work I could rent "Eraserhead" or "Tetsuo the Ironman" and get the same experience without all the work.

Also of note is how choppy the crappy graphics are and how loose the aiming is on the PS2 version. Yet I traded it in for the PS2 version of Resident Evil 4 which is a zillion times prettier and more complicated and has a smaller firing arc to deal with, yet it runs and aims like a dream. Weird.